Paint it Black: Skirt to Dress

It's April 30th, and this should be my last post for this month's refashion theme, "Paint it black." Today is Wednesday and Saturday was WAW's Legacy. I wrote about what that is on this post. It was just as hard as I thought it would be.
This dress, I thought would be easy. I've seen people do it on legitimate crafting blogs and it doesn't look difficult. Take a long skirt; hike it up over your boobs, add a belt, and maybe do something for sleeves...and there, now it's a dress. Here's what I started with:

That was hanging in a closet at my parents' house. It was my favorite skirt when I was about 20; goth and walking around tryin' to look like Steve Nicks.

A continuous source of inspiration

As you can see, the elastic waistband has disintegrated with time. Which is crazy, because it's not like it's been hanging there for 30 years! It wasn't that long ago that I was buying witchy clothes at Hot Tpoic!

I was able to open up the seam and pull out that old elastic, seen in the picture. How cool is the pointy hem on that skirt? I believe they call that a handkerchief hem. Yup, I just checked. I have one in my blogger profile pic.
Anyway, I thought that I could add some sort of string and fashion some kind of simple halter or shoulder straps to keep that skirt boob high.

Lucky for me, I had that great velvet ribbon from my sewing supplies haul a couple weeks ago. Using a safety pin, I worked it through the holes that I pulled the elastic out of.
It just wasn't working. I experimented with different ways of using that ribbon, but none were viable options. I figured that I better just replace the elastic.

Sigh. So, I worked my elastic through, as you can see. You can't freakin' miss it, because the skirt is sheer and I only had white elastic. Oh, then, I'll just move on.
With the elastic, the skirt would have held itself up, but I wanted to do more than just restore the skirt to it's original state. I wanted straps, but wasn't sure what to use. I decided to add loops in the front and back of the skirt's waist line, like internal belt loops. Then I could add change-able materials for straps. You follow?

Yeah, the picture is bad, it's always dark when I do this stuff. But, do you see the little loops made from thin ribbon pinned on there?

That is a fabric scrap from the heap. This was excess fabric from that green tulle skirt that I did last month. All I did was take that piece of fabric and tie it to the two loops in the front of the dress, thus creating a halter. Ta da! Then I gave this thing a waist by adding a belt. The results were...
Meh. It's really not something that I would wear. I messed with this thing all Saturday and never found that it looked all that great. Here are a few pics:

Sure, it's a nice picture. I'm not gonna post the bad ones. I got a few decent shots of me looking somewhat nice, but overall, I'm not in love with the outfit.
While taking this picture, I also experimented with another skirt, using the no sew method. First it was like this:

It's a size 10 thrift score buy for $2. Something about the turquoise roses made it appealingly ugly to me. Here's what I did with this one:

I pulled it up over a tank top, pinned it closer around the boob area and hid that safety pin with a black clip on earring (sorry it's not visible). I'm sure that this outfit looks lovely, but I'm just not feeling it. It's not me and I don't like it. I have another idea for it, of course.

Thanks, photo editor! It looks less nice in person. Thanks for looking at this post, I totally plan on my next refashion to be much better.